Story Log 1:

When I arrived in the bar, Phil was already there. He had his datacom in one hand and a black coffee in the other."That EskarLife job was too close," he said as I approached, "the ban on private storage has made data exfiltration way to risky" I sat down across the table from him. "We'll find a way around that. The nerds are working on a better encryption" He grimaced. We both knew that they'd said they were close six months ago, but every time someone trialled a black market datawall it wasn't long before they disappeared. Rumour had it that the Force had a new AI anti-encryption package they'd imported from somewhere.

I pulled out my datacom and the drinks menu popped up automatically. And then it hit me.

"The problem is that all the storage is online" I began.  Phill laughed drily, "And how would we get the data onto it? Where would even you get a processor you knew was clean? Nothing since '45 has safe microcode" "It's just storage Phill, any processor faster than a potato would do. Maybe someone's got a stack of archaic compute boards stashed up somewhere."

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Two weeks later my searching turned up the first hints of success. A stack of Av6 broadcom IC's had escaped the silicon shortage of the 20's and now there there was a good sized stash sitting under my desk. My manufactory hummed away gently next to me. I'd found the manufacturing shema for a compute board and tweaked it for the IC's I had. It would use up most  my supply of tantalum to produce the passives, but I'd worry about that later. The following nights found me alternatively hunched over a scope, or scratching my head as I waded through the reference manuals for a 30 year old kernel.

Eventually I gave up, and gave Gregorio a call. He knew a lot more about this than I did, so I pushed the electrical side of the project over to him.

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My manufactory still had plenty of hydrocarbons and metals, so I started thinking about the practicality of it. We would need a large storage capacity for some of our jobs, and as silicon manufacturing as locked down the only option was  the completely archaic magnetic drive. Magnetic drives aren't physically robust when operating, and we'd be slinging this thing around on jobs, so we'd need to suspend the internals on some sort of shock mount. 

When on a job we'd need to be able to connect it to other equipment, so a quick way to expose and connect the data ports would be required. Either the housing would need external ports which would be vulnerable to damage, or some sort of quick-access latch would need to be built in. I liked the idea of a quick access system - it would make working on the system much easier.

It was time to pull out the VR headset and start with the CAD.....